Cellular rearrangements between olfactory cells and supporting cells, driven by the different expression and distribution of nectins and cadherins, are required for mosaic cellular patterning in the olfactory epithelium.

The morphologies of ectodermal organs are shaped by appropriate combinations of several deformation modes, such as invagination and anisotropic tissue elongation. However, how multicellular dynamics are coordinated during deformation processes remains to be elucidated. Here, we developed a four-dimensional (4D) analysis system for tracking cell movement and division at a single-cell resolution in developing tooth epithelium. The expression patterns of a Fucci probe clarified the region- and stage-specific cell cycle patterns within the tooth germ, which were in good agreement with the pattern of the volume growth rate estimated from tissue-level deformation analysis. Cellular motility was higher in the regions with higher growth rates, while the mitotic orientation was significantly biased along the direction of tissue elongation in the epithelium. Further, these spatio-temporal patterns of cellular dynamics and tissue-level deformation were highly correlated with that of the activity of cofilin, which is an actin depolymerization factor, suggesting that the coordination of cellular dynamics via actin remodeling plays an important role in tooth epithelial morphogenesis. Our system enhances the understanding of how cellular behaviors are coordinated during ectodermal organogenesis, which cannot be observed from histological analyses.

We study a Wess-Zumino-Witten model with target space AdS 3 ×(S 3 ×S 3 ×S 1 )/Z 2 . This allows us to construct space-time N = 3 superconformal theories. By combining left-, and right-moving parts through a GSO and a Z 2 projections, a new asymmetric (N , N ) = (3, 1) model is obtained. It has an extra gauge (affine) SU (2) symmetry in the target space of the type IIA string. An associated configuration is realized as slantwise intersecting M5-M2 branes with a Z 2 -fixed plane in the M-theory viewpoint. †

For isolated single cells on a substrate, the intracellular stiffness, which is often measured as the Young's modulus, E, by atomic force microscopy (AFM), depends on the substrate rigidity. However, little is known about how the E of cells is influenced by the surrounding cells in a cell population system in which cells physically and tightly contact adjacent cells. In this study, we investigated the spatial heterogeneities of E in a jammed epithelial monolayer in which cell migration was highly inhibited, allowing us to precisely measure the spatial distribution of E in large-scale regions by AFM. The AFM measurements showed that E can be characterized using two spatial correlation lengths: the shorter correlation length, l S , is within the single cell size, whereas the longer correlation length, l L , is longer than the distance between adjacent cells and corresponds to the intercellular correlation of E. We found that l L decreased significantly when the actin filaments were disrupted or calcium ions were chelated using chemical treatments, and the decreased l L recovered to the value in the control condition after the treatments were washed out. Moreover, we found that l L decreased significantly when E-cadherin was knocked down. These results indicate that the observed long-range correlation of E is not fixed within the jammed state but inherently arises from the formation of a large-scale actin filament structure via E-cadherin-dependent cell-cell junctions.

There exist logarithmic CFTs(LCFTs) such as the c p,1 models. It is also well known that it generally contains Jordan cell structure. In this paper, we obtain the boundary Ishibashi state for a rank-2 Jordan cell structure and, with these states in c = −2 rational LCFT, we derive boundary states in the closed string picture, which correspond to boundary conditions in the open string picture. We also discuss the Verlinde formula for LCFT and possible applications to string theory.